Chinese Students at Bard College Offended By Art Exhibit

Yaxue Cao, October 18, 2018

Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is a small liberal arts college with around 2500 students. The Campus Center is the central meeting place with a bookstore, a cafe, a post office, computer terminals, a small auditorium, lounge areas and art exhibit space. On October 1, a photo exhibit was mounted along the hallways of the center. It is called, adopting a well-known Mao Zedong quote, “Weightier Than Mount Tai, Lighter Than a Feather: Human Rights Experience of Chinese Contemporary Art.”

Featuring ten artists (all but two lived in China), the exhibit includes photographs, conceptual compositions, negative images of Tiananmen Square in 1989, and photographs that depict a wide range of life in China: the student movement in Beijing, migrant workers in the slums outside Beijing, prostitutes and homesexuals. Photographs of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014 and the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan the same year are also on display. It is a traveling exhibit and was first shown at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. It ends on October 19 at Bard.

On October 3, Siyuan Min (闵思渊), who goes by the name ‘Frederick S. Min,’ a political science major and chair of the Chinese Student Organization on campus, wrote a long letter to one of the two curators of the exhibit, Patricia Keretzky. Keretzky is Oskar Munsterberg Lecturer in Art History and author of more than 10 books about Chinese art, religious and secular, medieval and contemporary. From his letter, we gathered that the exhibit stirred quite a bit of sentiment from a WeChat group that consisted of current Chinese students at Bard, recent graduates and visiting scholars from China. In his letter to Ms. Keretzy, Mr. Min summed up this “vibrant and highly intellectual conversation” on WeChat, China’s popular but heavily censored and surveilled online messaging platform.

The community of Chinese students (currently over 100) and scholars at Bard took issue with the exhibit on three points: the topic, the date and the offensiveness of it.

Photo: Chen Chuangchuang.

They objected to the sensitive nature of the topic, singling out “the images of protests,” “an armed person waving a gun in front of Mao Zedong,” and “a Statue of Liberty photoshopped to be on Tiananmen Square where the Monument to the People’s Heroes actually stand(s),” the last of which implying that the two symbols of struggle contravene each other.

They took issue with the date. Why launch the exhibit on October 1, our National Day, “the equivalent of July 4th”? When “a rather reckless man insisted on attending a military drill” on the Serbian national day, he said, a diplomatic crisis ensued causing World War I. He then walked back a little bit from the parallel between Archduke Franz Ferdinand causing World War I with his assassination and the two curators provoking Chinese students at Bard, but we get the idea: it’s a grievous provocation.

Mr. Min went on conveying how Chinese students felt: they feel ‘ambushed’ by such an exhibit at the student center; they feel embarrassed when asked questions by their curious American friends; their pride in their nationality is hurt; they feel “a certain sense of betrayal” because at Bard the atmosphere has been “pluralistic yet always respectful.”

So the photo exhibit is a deviation from the pluralistic and respectful atmosphere at Bard according to this junior. When Chinese students at the University of California San Diego opposed the Dalai Lama giving the commencement speech, they applied the same awkward, brain teaser logic.

Because of the exhibit, the Chinese students and scholars feel, Min went on, judged by “our nationality, our ethnics, the history of our country or the policies of our government.”

But isn’t it the case that the Chinese students and scholars have all these hurt feelings precisely because they themselves identify with the repressive regime, with the policies of the Chinese government and its political sensibilities? They do not seem to recognize that each and every Chinese citizen has the right not to identify with the government. As a political science student, young Mr. Min should know better.

In reply, Ms. Keretzky invited the junior and the Chinese students to come to the screening of dissident films by Chinese artists and a roundtable discussion afterward on Saturday at the Campus Center. None of them came. She also ask Mr. Min to post her response on WeChat. I don’t know whether this has been done. I doubt it, because the words ‘human rights’ and the name ‘Liu Xiaobo’ will not pass through the censorship, even if Min tries to. I doubt he would try in the first place.

Photo: Chen Chuangchuang.

“I want to have a dialogue with the Chinese students on campus,” Wu Yuren (吴玉仁), a participating artist, said on Saturday at Bard. “This is a serious exhibit. In 2015, Patricia met with us in Beijing and we had a discussion about it. We know why we do this. Today’s China is undergoing a massive transformation, and artists have the acutest sense it. As freedom of speech is being choked off and art creation faces more and more restriction, it’s only natural that artists are going to express such repression.”

I asked Mr. Wu what would happen to these artists living in China, he said, they are used to regular police summons known as ‘drinking tea,’ forced evictions, and shutdowns of exhibits. “Under dictatorship, artists who explore its manifestations face big dangers.” Wu Yuren himself was detained for ten months in 2010 for using what they called the “rights defense performance art” to oppose forced demolition of art districts in Beijing where he and hundreds of artists had their studios.

“By the way,” he said at Bard, “I want to state a common sense here: October 1st is not the birthday of our motherland.”

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9 Comments

Students at Bard College should ask yourself, why you come to the U.S.? Earning money or concerning the freedom, or both? Donald Trump is right, almost every Chinese student is a spy. Think about it. Do you know what the real shame is?Ignorance as a little Child but at a age of an adult.

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Between the Sweden incident and the Chinese reporter in Birmingham incident, I’ve come to better understand the fundamental lack of understanding that CCP-educated Chinese have about how Western countries function.

I see comments from Chinese nationalists who believe the uncensored existence of Hong Kong independence advocacy in the UK, for example, constitutes official support from the British government for Hong Kong independence.

I see a strange belief that it is somehow the duty of anyone who has a dispute with Chinese nationals overseas (for example, the staff of Generator youth hostel in Stockholm or individual on-call Stockholm police officers) to contact the Chinese embassy on their behalf.

There is a widespread attitude that criticism of the Chinese governments from television pundits, such as John Oliver, constitutes a nationalist attack on China.

These nationalists fail to understand that individual opinions exist separately from their governments. They do not understand that criticism of a government or a leader or certain aspects of a country do not constitute hatred of that country and its people as a whole. They fail to understand that individual criticism that is not censored by a government does not constitute government endorsement of said criticism. They fail to understand that freedom of speech allows freedom to promote ideas which may go against the present status quo. They fail to understand that criticism of another country’s government does not automatically constitute an endorsement of one’s own government’s actions and policies. They fail to understand that in Western countries, individuals do not see themselves as representative of their national governments, do not always see their national governments as representative of them as individuals, and do not expect their government to get personally involved in individual disputes as trivial as a dispute with hotel staff.

I think that, instead of laughing at “wumaos” and rolling our eyes at their whataboutisms, we need to be more understanding of the fact that these people genuinely do not know any better and are victims of their environment. We can’t expect telling them to fuck off to have any effect because the truth is, it won’t. They actually believe that whataboutism is a logical debate tactic and that your criticism of their leaders is actually an assault on their country and all people who come from there.

But how to get through to them? How to get them to get past their culture shock and understand how things actually work? How to get them to realize that open national news coverage of societal problems in foreign countries in the absence of such coverage of domestic societal issues in China is actually a sign of progress in those countries rather than evidence of inferiority?

[…] More recently, it’s been in the news (well, the news among China-watchers) because of a controversy over an art exhibit. You can read the story, entitled “Chinese Students at Bard College Offended By Art Exhibit”, here at the China Change website. […]

Freedom of thought….Freedom of Expression…..China is the world largest, open air dictatorship.
China is not communist or socialist. Just a not very clever small group of Kleptocrats….who have stolen the Chinese peoples’ Freedoms, liberties…and their money too.

Siyuan Min (闵思渊), your screed marks you for who you are. CCP member in good standing!
I challenge you to stand in the center of Tiannamin square on CCTV and denounce Xi Jin Ping
an Mao Zedong as the mass murderers they are and were! See I can do that in my country!
Or better yet call on the CCP to free the Uighurs of Xinjiang. You can’t and you won’t!
It’s why Donald Trump can accuse you of being a spy…was he right?

If China was really communist or socialist……China would have no Billionaires! If China were
really free…..Chinese citizens would not require permits to travel in-country. If China were
really free….why are the lawyers in jail with their clients? If China were really free…why can’t Chinese citizens use the regular WWW(Internet.)? Why are Chinese citizens imperiled, impoverished or imprisoned for annotating the emperor’s imperfections? Which mass of
Chinese citizens called for 24 X 7 days a week ” facial recognition surveillance”?
Until Chinese people can speak without terror fearing retaliation or repercussion………
Then Great China will never rise to her TRUE GREATNESS that the world has been waiting for.
Instead Mr.Xi, seems to be using a Japanese, pre-WWII playbook(i.e. (9-dash-line.) etc
which led to WWII. Is this where we heading WWIII? When did the Chinese people sign on for this?